Great filters, not so great editing

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Our Verdict

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adnX Imagerie pitches itself as an entry-level photo editor, and the developer says the app wasn't designed to be "a clone of Photoshop or one of its competitors".

This is just as well, because Imagerie's bitmap-editing features are terrible. Bizarrely, such edits are done in a separate 'bitmap editor' window that has a horribly basic toolset, not even including cloning.

Where Imagerie succeeds a little more is in making basic adjustments to a photograph's canvas (cropping, flipping, rotation) and applying effects. Along with the kind of enhancement tools you get in iPhoto (exposure, saturation, and so on), Imagerie bundles a number of powerful filters based around classic camera types and provides access to Mac OS X's many Core Image filters.

There's also a selection of vector tools for applying shapes and text, which are fine, if occasionally fiddly.

The biggest problem this app has, though, is competition: iPhoto's fine for basic edits and most Mac users will have a copy; PhotoStyler (also £18) beats Imagerie for effects; and Acorn (£30) is significantly better for anything related to bitmap editing and working with vectors.

Imagerie's interface is extremely variable – the fullscreen mode is great, as is the app's single-window design, but drawn shapes aren't always selected, the history navigator is awful, and too many controls are fiddly.

As such, the product needs a bunch more work before we'd make a recommendation over one of its contemporaries.